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60 Minutes on CBS, Sunday, Feb. 24th, did a piece about the suspicious prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman. Karl Rove asked one of Don Siegelman's staff to spy on him and try to catch him cheating on his wife. She never did catch him doing anything like that, but Rove asked her to spy on other occasions.

Funny thing: thousands of people across Alabama last night, as the 60 minutes piece was airing, found that their TV reception was inexplicably absent. Many people report that their screen went black for 15 minutes or so.

"All last week the White House was pressuring CBS to not air the segment. Well it did air last night, but was magically blacked out in parts of Alabama."--from here.

Coincidence? Or did the White House force some cable TV companies to black out the segment?

Here you can see the piece and read the transcript. Thank goodness for the Internet--although not everyone who was prevented from watching 60 Minutes last night will look it up online.

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(CBS) Is Don Siegelman in prison because he’s a criminal or because he belonged to the wrong political party in Alabama? Siegelman is the former governor of Alabama, and he was the most successful Democrat in that Republican state. But while he was governor, the U.S. Justice Department launched multiple investigations that went on year after year until, finally, a jury convicted Siegelman of bribery.

Now, many Democrats and Republicans have become suspicious of the Justice Department’s motivations. As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, 52 former state attorneys-general have asked Congress to investigate whether the prosecution of Siegelman was pursued not because of a crime but because of politics...

DAR
Harper's magazine has quite a report on this here.

It gets worse.

See here.
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As 60 Minutes was putting its show together, the White House put pressure on CBS -- the parent company -- to kill the show. Over the last few days, as word got out that the 60 Minutes show would air tonight, Karl Rove's associates began planting defamatory stories about journalists working on this story... and attacking the whistle-blower who came forward, Dana Jill Simpson. If you recall, Ms. Simpson testified, under oath, to Congress about Karl Rove's involvement in politicizing the DOJ. What you may not know, however, is that her house mysteriously caught fire and she was run off the road in the weeks leading up to her testimony.

What you may also not know is that Governor Siegelman's house was broken into twice during his trial as was his attorney's office.

Yesterday, the attacks on Simpson and journalists increased with a series of emails from the Alabama GOP.

... During the 60 Minutes broadcast and ONLY during the Don Siegelman portion -- the screen went black for Huntsville residents and Mobile residents. There are other reports of other locations, but I have not yet confirmed those...

I'm never in favor of news black outs for the best disinfectant is sunlight.

It's quite possible the Siegelman case-conviction will be appealed. It could go to a new trial and hence the news black out. Also the broadcast could likely effect other investigations and trials yet to come.

DOUG
The TV station that blacked out the Seigelman report is close to admitting its "error." They were pressured into re-running the 60 minutes report.

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In 1955, when WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss., did not want to run a network report about racial desegregation, it famously hung up the sign: “Sorry, Cable Trouble.” Audiences in northern Alabama might have suspected the same tactics when WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate, went dark Sunday evening during a “60 minutes” segment that strongly suggested that Don Siegelman, Alabama’s former Democratic governor, was wrongly convicted of corruption last year.

The report presented new evidence that the charges against Mr. Siegelman may have been concocted by politically motivated Republican prosecutors — and orchestrated by Karl Rove. Unfortunately, WHNT had “technical problems” that prevented it from broadcasting a segment (the problems were resolved in time for the next part of the show) that many residents of Alabama would no doubt have found quite interesting.

After initially blaming the glitch on CBS in New York, the affiliate said it learned “upon investigation,” and following a rebuke from the network, that “the problem was on our end.” It re-broadcast the segment at 10 p.m., pitting it against the Academy Awards on rival ABC, before Daniel Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar. As public criticism grew, it ran it again at 6 p.m. on Monday.

Stan Pylant, WHNT’s president and general manager, assured viewers that “there was no intent whatsoever to keep anyone from seeing the broadcast.”

See here.